On an​​ otherwise nondescript Saturday, Yahoo! fantasy football expert Liz Loza found herself in a North Hollywood Target with two Marines and her 5-year-old son. She had $3,000 to spend on toys, books, art supplies and more. But Loza wasn’t shopping for her family. She was at this particular Target on this particular day on behalf of Fantasy Cares. The Marines accompanying her were representatives from the local Toys for Tots.

CBSSports.com fantasy expert Heath Cummings was in a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Target, flanked by a team of five helpers and, like Loza, armed with $3,000. But there was a uniquely Hallmark-movie twist to Cummings’ South Florida shopping adventure — a good Samaritan at the store had a 20 percent off coupon and gave it to Cummings and his shopping crew as they were checking out, boosting his budget by $600. “Headed back for round 2,” Cummings tweeted, as part of a live chronicling of his charitable run. Cummings’ final tally? Eight shopping carts, all for charity. He handed the haul off later that night to local Toys for Tots representative Sgt. Thomas Fretwell.

A few days from now, Fanball.com’s Scott Fish will visit an Eagan, Minn., Target. Like Loza and Cummings, he will be tasked with getting toys that will all go immediately to Toys for Tots. But Fish will have significantly more money to spend — around $22,500. As the founder of Fantasy Cares, Fish has raised thousands to buy toys for needy kids, finding a way to sneak altruism into our obsession with fantasy football. For that, he’s earned The Athletic Fantasy’s 2018 Person of the Year.

Fantasy players have known the name Scott Fish for almost a decade, thanks to the Scott Fish Bowl — a mega-league composed of many smaller leagues that began in 2010. The intent was to connect the widespread fantasy community — “to bring us all closer to each other,” Fish said. That year, Fish invited 96 fantasy experts and nonaffiliated players to compete against one another; Mike Clay, then with Pro Football Focus, took home the inaugural title. Fish finished second.

After a brief hiatus, the Fish Bowl returned in 2015. It also brought with it a cause: Fantasy Cares.

Inspired by a 2014 Toys for Tots GoFundMe drive run by his Dynasty League Football co-worker at the time, Jeff Miller, Fish asked participants in the 2015 Fish Bowl to make a small donation to Fantasy Cares. At the end of the season — right before Christmas — Fish took the $1,500 raised, sent $750 to Miller in Las Vegas, and the two went shopping at their local Toys R Us. The gifts were donated to Toys for Tots, and a tradition was born.

Fish said Toys For Tots is one of his “three or four favorite charities. I see how excited my son gets when he gets a gift, and just the thought of kids that don’t normally get those and what it must be like for them, and to just brighten their holiday season … I just love that.”

Count the Eagan Target among those fully on board. Store director Kayla Knutson said that since Fish gave them warning about this event more than a month ago, they were able to bring in extra team members to help Fish’s shopping group (he guessed he’ll have six other shoppers with him) as well as front-end help (Fish assumed this will be a personal cashier).

Fish, 39, likes to spread out the donations across several cities. This year, he’s enlisted Loza, Cummings and John Bosch (host of the Dynasty Game Night podcast), among others, to shop and donate to their local Toys for Tots.

Cummings bolstered the image of fantasy football on an unexpectedly grassroots level during his Target run. “A very cool part of the whole thing,” Cummings said, “was the number of people — including Sgt. Fretwell — asking where the money came from, and the look on their faces when I told them ‘the Fantasy Football community.’ The cashier actually said, ‘I guess I can’t tell my husband fantasy football is good for nothing anymore.'”

Loza, meanwhile, said she used the experience as an opportunity “to teach (my son) about giving back, humility and staying grateful.” But he also proved to be a great resource, reminding his mom not to buy too many toys with small pieces that could be choking hazards for recipients with younger siblings, while urging the purchase of his preferred gift, Magna-Tiles.

There also was some bonding with the Marines, especially in the book aisle.

“Each one of us — from the Marines, to myself, to my son — all had big reactions to our favorite books,” Loza recalled. “Whether it was something we read as a child or read to our own children, we were all excited at the prospect of sharing our most beloved stories, as well as the idea of growing a young person’s imagination.”

(Courtesy of Fantasy Cares)

On the Fantasy Cares website, there’s a page that lists the donations that all the entrants, players and fans have made. Full disclosure: I’m on there, with what looks, now, like a cheap $40 donation. To be fair, the “welcome” email Fish sent out suggested a $40 donation, and this was my first year playing, and I had no idea the page would be littered with three- and four-figure donations.

A few lines above my name sits that of James Roday — playing in his second Scott Fish Bowl — who donated $1,100.

If you feel like Roday’s name sounds familiar, it should; he starred for eight seasons as Shawn Spencer on the TV show “Psych.” And he currently appears on the critically acclaimed “A Million Little Things” on ABC.

“I did not see that coming,” Fish said. “It was very amazing of him.”

Each year, Fish, a father of two, finds himself lording over more participants in the Fish Bowl; it climbed from 120 owners in 2015 to 240 in 2016 to 360 in 2017 to a whopping 900 players in 2018. As the Fish Bowl grew, so too, did the Fantasy Cares donations. In 2016, Fantasy Cares raised $6,000. In 2017, the number was $15,000. And when the dust settled on this season, Fantasy Cares had raised $44,250. Fish kicked in an extra $250 to make it $44,500 because, he said, “I wanted a round number.”

The entrants in this year’s Scott Fish Bowl ranged from ESPN Australia & New Zealand personality Laurie Horesh (who finished the regular season 11-2) to “average Joe” entrant Dylan Straus (who finished with the second-most points overall). And when one of the 900 owners disappeared before the draft, Fish was hit with a whopper of a volunteer replacement: Matthew Berry, the biggest name in fantasy sports, who took on the orphaned team.

“I had always heard about the Scott Fish Bowl and for whatever reason — schedule, who knows — I never played in it,” Berry said. “But then I met Scott in person for the first time at the FSTA conference in Minnesota and we talked about me maybe playing in it.”

Since invites were already out by the time the conference took place in June, it appeared Berry would have to wait until 2019. Then Fish tweeted his need for a replacement owner.

“I happily jumped in,” Berry recalled. The reaction from Berry’s new league-mate, Russ Prentice, led to this reply:

Berry’s tweet, Fish said, sent well more than $1,000 in donations to Fantasy Cares that day (“I can’t thank him enough for that,” Fish said). You won’t find Berry’s name on the website’s official donation tally, but he made a sizable contribution in private to the charity.

“It’s a great cause, of course but more than that, the event shows all the very best sides of fantasy football — the competition, the camaraderie and the community,” Berry explained, “as so many come together to do two great things: play fantasy football and raise money and awareness for charity.

“I’ll be back next year,” he vowed.

(Joe Scarnici / Getty Images for David Yurman)

In 2017, Fish walked into Toys R Us with $7,500. He filled what he estimated to be “20 to 30” shopping carts, but didn’t keep an exact count because the gifts were immediately put into those ubiquitous Toys For Tots cardboard boxes and loaded onto a truck.

The gifts, according to Sgt. Jared VonBargen of the U.S. Marine Corps, were then dispersed among local agencies (mainly charities, churches and community centers), who handle the distribution of the presents. “We’re sort of a giant networking program,” VonBargen explained, “from donations through charities to needy families.”

The Minneapolis-area Marines, though, have two exceptions to the process.

The first is the Rock Bottom Brewery’s “Christmas Miracle,” when they personally distribute meals and toys to homeless kids and their families on Christmas Day. Rock Bottom Brewery closes its doors on Christmas and serves more than 1,500 people in the Twin Cities.

A second exception is an event at the local hospital, Children’s Minnesota.

“The hospital staff asks all the kids what they want from Santa and we find those items in our donations and pull it out for a special shipment to the hospital,” VonBargen said. The toys are taken to the hospital and the children get to visit with Santa. “As the kids tell Santa what they want, a Marine comes out around a corner with the exact toy they just asked for.”

One of the names you’ll see on the Fantasy Cares donor list is RotoWear, a fantasy sports T-shirt company that has been around since the summer of 2017.

RotoWear is the brainchild of Kenneth Tevelowitz, who is better known on Twitter as “Kenneth Cashman” — a rapping fantasy sports superfan whose email signature identifies him as “Commissioner” instead of, say, “Owner” or “CEO” of RotoWear. Cashman’s company has more than 250 designs, including the popular “Lineups and Chill” and “Waiver Wire Warrior” shirts that fantasy fans have likely seen anywhere from Dane Martinez’s Twitter feed to The Fantasy Footballers’ video show (which helped Fantasy Cares raise money this season by running best ball eliminator leagues).

But one of the shirts in the RotoWear store this summer featured a football-ized fish inside a retro TV set. It screamed “SCOTT FISH BOWL” underneath. The O’s formed an “8” to recognize the eighth iteration of the tournament. Tevelowitz said it took him “an hour or two” to design. A portion of the sales went toward Fantasy Cares.

The shirt was available on a limited run over the summer. Tevelowitz sold “roughly 300” of them (“My wife and I folded and packed every single one,” he said). Orders came in from as far as Ireland and South Africa. Customers bought the shirt in multiple colors; some bought it in all four. It was the summer’s best-seller, and RotoWear’s donation to the charity totaled $3,684.80.

“Out of all the things that RotoWear has accomplished this year,” Tevelowitz said, “the thing I am most proud of was helping raise that money.”

Fish has 8,500 people on a list to play next year, but estimated he’ll have just 1,080 teams competing in 90 leagues. The attention needed to run 90 drafts and input information for more than 1,000 teams is his limit, he said. “The playoffs are a ton of work,” Fish lamented. But more teams means more donations. And that means more toys, and more Marines rounding more corners with more gifts for more sick kids stuck in a hospital on Christmas Day.

Try to tell Scott Fish he’s doing great things and he’ll pass the compliment off to the fantasy players who donated, or to Roday and Berry, or the people at the Eagan Target. Fish will mention, several times over the course of our conversations, an idea he hopes to grow from the Fantasy Cares momentum: individual fantasy football leagues setting aside one entry fee each year to put toward a charity or donation. Just on their own, with no Fantasy Cares element involved.

“There are hundreds of thousands of fantasy leagues,” Fish said. “If every league set aside one of the entry fees for charity, we could do a lot of good.”

(Top photo: Courtesy of Scott Fish)

Nando Di Fino has won multiple industry awards for writing, analysis, hosting, and production. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association and has dispensed fantasy advice for ESPN, The Wall Street Journal, MLB Network, CBS Sports, the Associated Press, and more. Suivez Nando sur Twitter @nandodifino.